Upgraderate! Upgraderate!

My desktop PC was bought in 2005 -- or was it 2004? Anyway, it's obviously an antique in computer terms: although it still runs all my most-used applications, the Service Pack and other bloatware upgrades to which Windows XP has been subject over the means that for at least the past year it has been loading and running with what seems glacial slowness. I can of course use the jolly old Ctrl-Alt-Delete shortcut to access the list of stuff that loads on start-up and terminate all manner of rubbish lurking around waiting to access the internet when I don't want it to, but the Windows system itself is obviously creaking under the strain -- the processor isn't fast enough, there is insufficient RAM available for the swap files the applications need, there are periods when the hard drive churns continuously away without actually doing anything (if you leave the PC alone for any reasonable length of time it takes ages to awake from hibernation), et bloody cetera. Yet I didn't want to upgrade, because buying anything new would mean getting something bundled with Windows 7, which -- like any other new Microsoft product -- is still being tested on the customer and has yet to have its Service Pack 1 released to fix the bugs and patch the security holes.

You can guess what's coming next, can't you?

Last Friday, after several days of e-mail outage -- which I thought might be because my years-old installation of Eudora had finally reached the end of its operating life, but subsequently proved to be the result of server problems with my ISP -- I went to PC World in Tottenham Hale on the way home from werk and had a browse of their available laptops. Quite an expensive browse, as it turned out: I spent £639 on an Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv6-2113sa Notebook running Windows 7, a model I chose because of its 500 Gb hard drive, 15.6-inch display, 4 Gb of RAM, fast graphics card, and lotsanlots of peripheral ports for Other Stuff like printers, bigger monitors, mice, external keyboards, back-up drives, etc. etc.. (Christ, don't I sound like a geek.)

And because Windows 7 is a new operating system, all of the organising features of Windows XP that I had come to regard as intuitive parts of my computer use have been junked, requiring users to learn how to use the machine all over again. *!$%£&!* Microsoft!

I squandered huge chunks of the weekend hacking through what felt like a counter-intuitive user interface and getting the thing partially set up for my use, chiefly downloading and installing the non-Microsoft applications that I prefer, and inevitably finding that (since Windows 7 is a 64-bit operating system and all previous Windows are 32-bit) some of them didn't work, even when I'd found the backwards compatibility option lurking in the depths of what used to be called the Control Panel (and is now called -- yeuch -- the Action Center). So I have my web-building program; but not the FTP application to actually upload pages to websites. I have my MP3 music library; but not the player used to rip CDs to MP3 format. Other issues were that although I could install the Microsoft Works Suite that I'd had on the desktop PC, it wouldn't import the spreadsheets I'd created thereon under Lotus 1-2-3 (probably my own fault for sticking with that superseded application because I'd got used to it instead of making the leap to Works' Excel-lite version, but still a bugger to have to copy-type them from the PC's screen).

On the other hand, I do have this spiffy, fast new laptop which doesn't weigh a ton, has a clean, attractive TFT display, an inbuilt webcam and (gasp!) Skype which appears to have either set itself up or which I appear to have set up without realising it, which means that I can now talk to real people over the internet and see how ghastly they are for myself instead of having to guess. And of course I can now do really wanky look-at-me-I'm-a-poser things like web the surf while sitting in pavement cafes or watch DVDs on long train journeys. Bloody hell, I may even take the thing on holiday to Purbeck with me in a couple of weeks, so that I can download and organise my photographs each day instead of waiting until we return. Heigh-ho!